1. Technical Field
The present invention relates in general to network systems and, in particular, to accessing web pages via a network. Still more particularly, the present invention relates to time managed access to web pages via a network.
2. Description of the Related Art
The Internet provides access to a vast array of web sites, many containing information updated daily. Searching through the vast array of web sites, also known as web surfing, is becoming a daily habit of more and more users.
With this daily habit of web surfing, a user may visit the same web sites each day. For example, a user may visit a news website and a sports website each day. Many web browsers include a feature for setting bookmarks to selected web sites, such that the bookmark can later be selected to return to the bookmarked web site. Thus, a user may get in the habit of periodically visiting a selection of bookmarked web sites.
While access to daily news, research, and other information is advantageous, there are also detriments to web surfing. A common detriment to web surfing is that because web sites provide so much information, when a user accesses a particular web page to look-up specific information, the user can get hooked into reading all the other information on the site including that web page, thus spending more time surfing than intended or available.
Another detriment to web surfing is that because there are so many web sites available and many web sites contain advertising grabbing the attention of user, a user may start surfing for a specific purpose and get off track following advertisements, again spending more time surfing than intended or available. Further, while many companies find it advantageous to provide employees with Internet access for research and other job-related functions, it is detrimental to companies if employees are using a large amount of time surfing web sites of little or no relevance to the employee's job.
In view of the foregoing, it would be advantageous to provide a method, system, and program for time controlled access to a network. In particular, it would be advantageous to limit the amount of time a user spends at a particular web site or page or surfing through multiple web sites. Further, it would be advantageous to provide time controlled web surfing where both user specified and authority specified time limits control the amount of time a user spends surfing the web for non-job related information.